Giving cool real estate products, tools and news a Big Encore

About a month ago I had the pleasure of being invited to Calgary to attend a Realty Executive conference. I am not a Realtor, but I was invited nonetheless for my involvement in the Real Estate industry. During the conference one of the comments I heard buzzing about by the Realtors was “we need to market our listings everywhere”. Here are 3 unique websites that are growing in Canada where you can market your listings for free.

Housepal.ca has a list of local OpenHouse cities across Western Canada. Each city is a unique domain targeted directly to your local audience. I like this collection of Real Estate sites for 2 reasons. Firstly the are unique, they have found a niche and are growing it. Secondly, their website is targeted. According to Housepal, their traffic demographic are people aged 20-65, mostly female, with approximately 30% having pre-approved mortgages. Their mission is for the Realtor, they were one of the first websites offering free listings for Canadian Realtors when they launched in 2005, back when the only other option to advertise your open houses was the Newspaper which costs between $80-200 per listing.

StreetSeed.com

StreetSeed.ca

StreetSeed is as they put it, “Canada’s best kept secret”. According to StreetSeed’s blog they are working to launch an interactive social component for their site. They along with ZooCasa are working to compete directly with realtor.ca.

I like the simplicity of StreetSeed. It’s very easy to navigate. Their system works, and they have a large number of Real Estate listings.

Zoocasa.com

Zoocasa

Zoocasa is the noisiest of the bunch. Right from the second they launched, Zoocasa declared war on Realtor.ca. Competing with StreetSeed and Realtor.ca it is funded by Rogers Entertainment.

Zoocasa has a good site interface. Their listings are well advertised. They also offer some unique information like local information on schools, walkscore and more from wikipedia. They also have some other cool features like Ask the Pros, where a home buyer can ask a question and Realtors can respond to them.